Facing Fear - Part 1

Facing Our Fears

There are different synonyms to fear:  alarm, anxiety, dread, fearfulness, fright, horror, panic, scare, terror, trepidation, etc...

What do you gain by facing and overcoming your fears? You gain self-esteem! You gain courage! You gain wisdom!… You gain yourself! There is a wonderful feeling that comes from being free of your fears. Unchallenged fear becomes a prison for you that prevent you from going forward thus preventing you from accomplishing your goals and living victoriously. It binds and chains your mind so much so that you cannot think outside of the cell that you have allow yourself to be put in.

Avoidance of that fear leads to more avoidance and the fear escalates as you give in to it, thus you give it more power from you. You become powerless and it becomes more powerful over you, sometimes to the point of it becoming a “phobia” which we will discuss later. Being proactive in dealing with your fear will release the chains that bind you.

Your body reacts to fear. When the brain thinks or perceives that a situation is possibly life threatening, it reacts in 1 of 2 ways, “Fight or Flight”. “Fight” is the pathway of aggression to defend yourself and “flight” is the fear reaction that sets the body in motion to run or escape from the threat. This "fight or flight response" is essential in truly dangerous circumstances to decrease the chance of injury or death.

The key word here is "perceives". The perception that a situation is life threatening does not mean it is. And that is the problem. All of us have experienced fear at one time or another, but only some of us have actually experienced it to the point that we are in physical life threatening danger. However, although we may not be truly experiencing a life-threatening situation, because of our “perception” our body reacts as if we were.

This week we will discuss the symptoms of fear and the steps necessary to overcome it.

Self-Esteem - Part 3

Take heed what you put in your minds

& who you surround yourselves with

Do you have your inner armor on so that when someone speaks negatively against you, it doesn't pierce you?

Do you speak negatively to or about yourself to others and do you allow others to speak negatively to or about you?

i.e.: you make a mistake and say to yourself, “Stupid!  How’d you do that!”  This is a negative affirmation.

Never should that word come out of our mouths in dealing with anyone, especially ourselves!  And never allow anyone to belittle you. 

Instead, retrain your mind how to think and retrain yourself how to speak.  When you call yourself “stupid”, you are demeaning yourself and disrespecting yourself in your own eyes and in other people's eyes also.  As you continue saying things like that, you will begin to believe it.

Instead say, “wait a minute, I am not stupid… I am a very smart person who just made a mistake!”

Tell yourself positive things. Just as you would encourage your child to do better, encourage yourself the same way with kid gloves. 

Tell yourself that you are handsome or beautiful; tell yourself that you can get that job that you are interviewing for and that you are just as qualified as anyone else if not better; tell yourself that you can do the public speaking that you are afraid to do; tell yourself that you can get the A’s and B’s for your grades that you studied so hard for; tell yourself that you are going to ace your exams; tell yourself that you can do it.

Tell yourself positive things whenever doubt arises in your heart about who you are and what you can do.  Never give in to your doubts and fears.  Always fight against them with a new way of thinking and a new way of speaking positively.  When you change your way of thinking and your way of speaking, you change your state of mind thus changing your actions and your way of life.

Also, negative thoughts effect you physically negative.  With cancer patients, they have them get rid of unnecessary stress out of their lives as much as possible.  They have them get rid of any negative way of thinking.

If you think you’ll lose the battle… you just did! 

So, doctors always have cancer patients trying to think in positive ways of their healing and progress.

Negative thinking does the same thing. It is a cancer that eats away everything that you are and your hopes, dreams, and faith until you think that there is nothing left to fight for.

Don’t let it win today or anyday!